RE: Future of FrameMaker: InDesign?

[David Cramer <dacramer@xxxxxxxx>]

To Bill and Dan,

In this regard, perhaps you could comment on the place of MIF in all 
of this. As far as I know, MIF is a totally nonproprietary 
representation of anything that could possibly exist in a FrameMaker 
or FrameMaker+SGML layout and document.

Many of the complaints about FrameMaker's not advancing and adding 
requested features have nothing to do with what can be in a document. 
They essentially amount to interface change requests or added 
processing commands. They would not have had any impact on the 
resulting document anyway.

Given the apparent desirability of a robust, nonproprietary document 
format, is there some reason, legally or functionally, that MIF has 
not been more widely influential? (Just curious)

David


On Mon, 3 Jul 2000 11:12:12 +1000, HALL Bill <bill.hall@tenix.com> wrote:
>
>Dan Emory and a number of other contributors to the FM lists have been
>disappointed by the limited improvements that the recent FrameMaker 6.0
>release offers - after waiting 4 years from the 5.0 release. They think it
>is quite possible that Adobe will abandon the product. In an earlier posting
>to the Frame lists in response to these issues, I suggested that the problem
>was not related to FrameMaker or Adobe specifically, but rather the
>fundamental problem of keeping any kind of documentation requiring continued
>maintenance over a long life time (say more than three years) in a
>proprietary format.
>
>The questions were asked: When should companies begin considering shifting
>out of FrameMaker format to SGML or XML? What impact does the volume of
>legacy documents in FM proprietary format have on this decision? My short
>answers, based on my own experiences detailed below, are as follows:
>
>New documents: I am a firm believer that the time is past when any technical
>author/publisher should rely on a proprietary text processing application is
>past. FrameMaker is a good tool for long/complex documents, but its
>fundamental failing is that, like MS Word, WordPerfect, Interleaf, etc. the
>FrameMaker's document format is proprietary. Personally, I believe that all
>new document projects should be developed in one of the international
>standard markup languages, HTML, SGML or XML. Given that HTML is not well
>controlled and is being replaced by XML, I would opt for the latter.
>Assuming that you pay attention to the XML standards, SGML is only a way to
>author in XML under DTD control. Whatever tool you are using for authoring
>now, it is fairly certain that it will be obsolete in 3-4 years, so it is a
>mistake to think of your authoring in a tool-specific way. It is much better
>to focus on content and delivery.

-- 
David Cramer, Process Innovation Evangelist          87-1313 Border Street
PBSC Computer Training Centres (an IBM company)      Winnipeg MB R3H 0X4
Corporate Office Research & Development              Canada


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